“Drink.”Occam.
I pulled the bottle to me. I drank. My brain came rushing back at me.
Occam was holding me.He was sitting at my back, my spine against this chest. His arms around me. His legs around me. Holding me upright. I stiffened, and he eased away, taking his warmth with him, and he circled me until he was kneeling in front of me, his heated hands on my shoulders, holding me upright. “Nell, sugar. You okay?”
I nodded. My neck moved like an iron rod had been implanted in my spine. Pain shot up my back, into my head, and exploded. Little lights and fireworks went off, bright in the threatening darkness. I was pretty sure if I moved again my skull would disintegrate.
“We need to know what happened back there,” Occam said.
I frowned and blinked until I could look into his gold-flecked eyes. I managed a bare whisper. “Did you carry me out?”
“Yes. Nell? Are you okay?
“I... No. I have a headache big enough to drive a tractor into.”
He put something in my free hand. Two Tylenol. “Oh,” I murmured. “Magic pills. Goodie.” I set them on my tongue, finished the bottle of water, and gave him the empty.
Occam breathed out a shaky laugh. “What does she read?”
“Back to normal,” T. Laine said. “I think I’ll set it to default zero and not the fudged zero I started at.” At which point I realized that she had been reading me with the psy-meter 2.0 while I read the earth.
“Fudged zero?” Occam asked.
“With all the redlining, I set the background ambient zero as high as it would go. The way I’d set it if a small coven of witches were getting ready to do a working and I wanted to be able to read the energies of the spell itself over the energies of the witches.”
Occam hummed a note that reminded me of a purr. That had been the vibration at my back. Things were beginning to return to me, to make sense. Paka was sitting, front feet together, at my side. She was not purring, but was watching me with a cat stare, the kind a well-fed, bored cat gives a mouse. Alert, interested, but not ready to attack.
“What did I read when I was scanning the land?” I whispered. I looked at T. Laine and the movement of my head made the world swirl and nausea rise. There was a glare everywhere, and my eyeballs ached. I put my hands flat on the rock beneath me. And very deliberately did not allow myself to commune with the deep.
“You redlined,” she said shortly. “Even at the higher zero.”
Feeling more steady, I lifted my palms and studied them. My fingers were white and quivering, but there was no bleeding, no places where a knife had nicked me, cutting me free. The stitches were clean and neat, the flesh they held together looking far more healed than it should. The ground and the living things in it had attacked. I looked at my feet. No damage except a streak of red. I thought back to the questions Occam had asked me. “I’m okay. I think. Sick to the stomach. A little woozy.
“The smaller consciousness, the dancer... recognized me. From yesterday. It... didn’t grab me, exactly. I was probably only a few feet into the earth when it saw me. It wrapped around me. Yeah. Like a ribbon on my ankle. But not... not like it was taking me prisoner.” I touched my ankle. The skin was tender, but nothing had penetrated my flesh. “More like it was trying to get my attention. Trying to get me to see something.”
A flare of heat from a branding iron pierced through my brain. I breathed slowly, carefully, trying not to throw up. Orhurl, as I had learned in Spook School. I pressed a hand to my middle, to the rooty scars that marked me. Nothing felt different. That was good.
“I think... I think the dancer was trying to tell me something,” I said, “the same thing it told me yesterday. ‘Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools.’ But the last lines had changed. It was saying ‘Dead. All dead. All dead. Forever.’ It was singing the words, like bells. It was dancing in a loose, looped, figure-eight shape. It...” I stopped, trying to think what I wanted to say. “It’s almost as if it wants to communicate something.
“Then there was another presence. The woman, I think, human or witch. I didn’t sense magical energies, so I couldn’t tell. She grabbed me and pulled me down. Between them, they were smothering me. Dragging me deeper. The woman seemed to know I wasn’t human. So, two presences, one humanoid in its thought processes, one not. Not at all. I need to go back there.”
“Not happening,” Occam said.
“What cat man said. It took everything I had toBreakyou free.”
I squinted up at T. Laine. She flowed with the glare, like an aura surrounding her.Ah.I had a migraine. Auras came with migraines. The headache stabbed through my skull. “Owww.” I placed one hand to my head, and the stitches on my fingers shocked me. “Owwwie again.”
“Nell, sugar?”
“Headache is bad. Maybe a migraine? I never had anything like this before.” I squinted through the pain and asked T. Laine, “Was that the blue energies I saw? TheBreak?”
“You could see the energies?”
“Something blue cut straight down through the earth all around me in a circle. It cut through the dancer energies that were holding me. Cut me away from the woman. And I was free.”
“Go me.” But T. Laine sounded unhappy still and her face was set in a frown so deep it cut lines into her skin, and hair hung in black tangles around her face. She was staring at the small psy-meter in her hands.
Occam, still kneeling at my feet, handed me two things. They were soft and pink. Pretty. “Can you put them on?”
